RAPUNZEL - RAY HARRYHAUSEN - 1940's

After having seen King Kong for the first of many times in 1933, Harryhausen spent his early years experimenting in the production of animated shorts, inspired by the burgeoning science fiction literary genre of the period. After viewing Harryhausen's first formal demo reel of fighting dinosaurs from an abortive project called Evolution (an homage to a similar project of Willis O'Brien's called Creation (Merian C. Cooper, the producer of "King Kong", saw O'Brien's initial work for "Creation" and had him reassigned to "King Kong"), Paramount executives awarded him his first job, beginning on George Pál's Puppetoons shorts. During World War II, Harryhausen was also employed by the Army Motion Picture Unit, animating sequences educating soldiers about the use and deployment of military equipment when that equipment was unavailable for shooting in live action. From this work, he acquired several rolls of unused film from which he made a series of fairy tale-based shorts. After World War II, Ray Harryhausen shot a scene of an alien emerging from a Martian war machine based on H. G. Wells novel The War of the Worlds, part of an unrealized project to adapt the story using Wells' original "octopus" concept for the Martians. Harryhausen also produced a variety of other short animation demos during the post-WWII 40s. Harryhausen put together a demo reel of his various projects and showed them to Willis O'Brien, who eventually hired him as an assistant animator on what turned out to be Harryhausen's first major film, Mighty Joe Young (1949). O'Brien ended up concentrating on solving the various technical problems of the film, leaving most of the animation up to Harryhausen. Their work won the special effects Oscar Academy Award that year.

Author: jodyvalyou
Length: 10:54
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Tags: fairy  harryhausen  puppets  rapunzel  ray  tale